"I got your e-mail," he said. "I'm happy to talk to you."
"I'd just like to know a little bit about the testing that was done on the Magyar Venus," I said. "Dr. Molnar told me your lab did the work."
"Lovely piece," Madison said. "And yes, we did the testing. The mammoth ivory was found to be in the range that Dr. Molnar claims."
"So the Venus is twenty-five thousand years old, or there about."
"The mammoth ivory is about twenty-five thousand years old."
"You're saying that someone could have carved it much later."
"We couldn't find any indication of that. There were no metal knife marks or anything," he said, chuckling.
"So are you completely comfortable that the Venus is authentic?"
"For me to be completely comfortable," he said. "I would want stratigraphic documentation. Do you understand what I'm saying?"
"Sort of," I said.
"We use provenance a little differently from you antique dealers," he said. "You look at the hands the object in question has passed through. In archaeology, we consider the provenance, or provenience, of an artifact to be the find spot. There are cases in the authenticating of antiquities where it is possible to know who owned an object at any given point of time over decades if not centuries but where no one can say with any assurance where the object was originally found. This is apparently one of those times.
"Despite all the science of dating, stratigraphy is still the principal way to evaluate objects at an archaeological site. We call it archaeostratigraphy when it's used in archaeology, for obvious reasons. It all has to do with where exactly an object was found, on a horizontal matrix or grid and a vertical dimension as well, that is to say, in what layer, or stratum, the object was located, its relativity to other objects above or below it, or even in the same layer. If I'm being too academic here, please tell me."
"No, this is very helpful," I said. "Please continue."
"Ah, there's nothing like an interested audience for a lab man. You may have to stop me sooner or later. I'll try to be brief. The principles, the rules if you will, that govern stratigraphy are actually pretty obvious. Older strata are covered by younger strata, right? Material from an older stratum might make its way into a newer one, but not the other way around. If an object cuts across several strata, it can't be older than the uppermost strata in which it's been found. There are others, but this should give you the idea. Are you still with me?"
"I think so. If I were to excavate a site in, I don't know, Mesopotamia, or something, I would, as I go down, pass through several different civilizations and perhaps cities. If I found an object at one level, it could be older, and still in use. I'm an antique dealer, after all. I want people to use objects from an earlier era today. So for someone to have a pre-Columbian statue in their living room in twenty-first century New York, is not only possible, but it happens reasonably frequently."
"Exactly," he said. "But you wouldn't find a plastic baggy in the fourth-century level, or if you did, you would have a problem. You would definitely have had disturbance at the site."
"Right," I said.
"So stratigraphy is invaluable in assessing the sequences at a site, and the relative age of artifacts in context. Now these so-called Venuses of the Paleolithic," he said. "They've been found everywhere, and several of them are not documented properly. They just seem to turn up from time to time. They're found in a cave somewhere or other, nobody can remember which. They're found in the foundations of a house. One was found by the side of the road, if we are to believe that account, which I, for one, don't. We would be compelled to say that an exact stratigraphic determination would be pretty much impossible under these kinds of circumstances. Some, of course, were found by archaeologists in the course of excavation. Now with those, we can test the object, but we also have the stratigraphic evidence. We can date other objects in that stratum, using different dating methods, depending on the object. All dating methods have their limitations, you see. We used radiocarbon dating on the Magyar Venus, because it is made of mammoth ivory, and carbon dating works well on organic objects, that is objects that were once living things, up to about fifty thousand years old, no matter where they are found. Carbon dating is not much good beyond fifty thousand years, but the Venus is well within the range. For inorganics, ceramics for example, or flint which has been burned before it was buried, we could use thermoluminescence dating, or TL, which in principle lets us date way further back than fifty thousand years. So if we found the Venus in the same stratum as flint tools or ceramics, then we might be able to date both, and if they matched, then we'd be much more confident about the results."
"So for this particular Venus, we have a radiocarbon date of about twenty-five thousand years, and only anecdotal evidence as to where it was found," I said.
"Exactly. It is said to have been found in a cave. Which cave? Where in that cave? In what context? Dr. Molnar showed me the diaries of that fellow… what was his name?"
"Piper."
"Piper," he agreed. "We tested the diaries too, and the ink and paper checked out. Now Piper seemed to know what he was doing, and everything he did was well documented, so the anecdotal evidence is better than most. But we don't have the site, do we?"
"So what are you saying, exactly?"
"I'm saying that the mammoth ivory is about twenty-five thousand years old, that we could find no evidence, no smoking guns as it were, pointing to forgery, that the ink and paper on the diaries dates to about 1900. That is all I can say. I suppose I could add that most of the Venuses tend to date to that approximate time period, so at least it's consistent. And it fits the pattern. They're all essentially rather large around the middle with large drooping breasts, but small heads and tapering heads and limbs. This Venus is consistent with that, too."
"What about the ochre?"
"Right. There were traces of ochre. Dr. Molnar tells me that ochre was mined not far from there between about thirty and forty thousand years ago. Older than the Venus by quite a bit, but it does show that ochre was valued in that part of the world."
"Thank you for all of this," I said.
"My pleasure. I hope I didn't bore you."
"Not at all," I said. "In fact, it is all fascinating. Thank you."
"A pleasure," he said.
"Can I ask you one last question?"
"Shoot."
"My personal theory about testing is that you do it when you have a bad feeling, for want of a better term, about an object. I mean if I look at an antique, and there is something about it that bothers me, even though I can't point to anything specific about it, then I'll have it tested. So, leaving all that stuff about archaeostratigraphy aside, and trying to forget for a moment all the provisos you have to give when you're asked about the testing, do you have some sense about the Magyar Venus. Do you think it's genuine?"
"I can't really do that," he said. "But I suppose… my answer would be yes, I think it's genuine."
"Thank you," I said.
"Send me a copy of your article, will you?"
"Sure," I said. I would, too, if I ever wrote it.
It was hardly absolutely definitive, and there was certainly wiggle room no matter which side of this puzzle you were on. If you wanted to believe the Venus was genuine, there was evidence it was. If you didn't want to believe it, if you were Diana, just to pick a name out of a hat, then there was enough there to give you some small measure of satisfaction. To my mind, though, this was starting to look like a convincing if not airtight case for the Venus. I looked at my watch. It was time for the report from the Divas.